Chapter 9: The Nail

I was on my knees in the straw beside him before he finished saying it.

"Hold the lantern," he said.

I held it.

He cleaned the hoof out with his pick, slowly.

Mud. Straw. Then a glint of bright metal in the soft part of the frog.

A nail head.

Not one of her shoe nails.

A new one, square and shiny, driven straight up into the foot.

Laurent sat back on his heels and didn't say anything for a moment.

His face had gone very quiet.

"That didn't walk in there," he said.

"No."

He got the pincers from the tack room and came back.

"Talk to her," he said. "Keep her head."

I put my arms around Sable's neck and talked nonsense into her ear.

Papa's nonsense.

The things he used to say to foals.

Laurent took hold of the nail and pulled it out in one long draw.

Sable screamed and went up on her hind legs.

I hung on.

When she came down, there was blood on the straw, and Laurent was looking at the nail in the lantern light.

"An inch," he said. "If it went another half inch, it'd have hit the bone, and she'd never race again."

"Will she now?"

"If it doesn't fester." He wiped his hand on his trousers. "If it festers, I don't know."

He went to the barn door and rang the bell for the grooms.

They came stumbling out of the loft and the bunkroom, five of them, hair in their eyes.

Laurent stood in the middle of the aisle with the nail held up between his finger and thumb.

"Who had the night watch?"

There was a pause.

Then the youngest one stepped forward, a skinny boy of maybe twenty with a fresh cut on his thumb.

"Me, sir. Nothing happened. I didn't hear a thing."

I looked at his thumb.

Then I looked at his hands.

There was a black smear of hoof dirt under every one of his nails, and he hadn't touched a horse since supper.

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